Page:Beachy Head and Other Poems.pdf/42

34

Then lighten up the river, and make prominent The portal, and the ruin'd battlements Of that dismantled fortress; rais'd what time The Conqueror's successors fiercely fought, Tearing with civil feuds the desolate land. But now a tiller of the soil dwells there, And of the turret's loop'd and rafter'd halls Has made an humbler homestead—Where he sees, Instead of armed foemen, herds that graze Along his yellow meadows; or his flocks At evening from the upland driv'n to fold—

In such a castellated mansion once A stranger chose his home; and where hard by In rude disorder fallen, and hid with brushwood Lay fragments gray of towers and buttresses,